Strangeland
You awake in a nightmarish carnival and watch a golden-haired woman hurl herself down a bottomless well for your sake. You seek clues and help from jeering ravens, an eyeless scribe, a living furnace, a mismade mermaid, and many more who dwell within the park. All the while, a shadow shrieks from atop a towering roller-coaster, and you know that until you destroy this Dark Thing, the woman will keep jumping, falling, and dying, over and over again….
Strangeland is a classic point-and-click adventure that integrates a compelling narrative with engaging puzzles. For almost a decade, we’ve been working on a worthy successor to the fan-acclaimed Primordia, and we are proud, at long last, to share our second game.
Strangeland is a place like no other. Even in the real world, carnivals occupy a twilight territory between the fantastic and the mundane, the alien and the familiar. In their funhouse mirrors, their freaks, and their frauds, we see hideous and haunting reflections of ourselves, and we witness the wonder and horror of humanity in just a few frayed tents, peeling circus wagons, dingy booths, and run-down rides. Strangeland, of course, is most definitely not the real world. Indeed, unraveling the connections between this nightmare and the real world is the game’s central mystery, and finding a way out is its central challenge.
As you explore Strangeland, you will need to gather otherworldly tools and win strange allies to overcome a daunting array of obstacles. Forge a blade from iron stolen from the jaws of a ravenous hound and hone it with wrath and grief; charm the eye out of a ten-legged teratoma; and ride a giant cicada to the edge of oblivion…. Amidst such madness, death itself has no grip on you, and you will wield that slippery immortality to gain an edge over your foes.
Navigating this domain of monsters and metaphors will require understanding its denizens and its enigmas. Unlike many adventure games that offer a linear experience and single-solution puzzles, Strangeland lets you pick your own way, your own approach, and your own meaning—one player might win a carnival game with sharpshooting, another by electrical engineering; one player might unravel a strange prophet’s wordplay while another gathers visual clues scattered throughout the environment. Ultimately, Strangeland’s story will be your story. You are not the audience; you are the player.
- Approximately five hours of gameplay, replayable thanks to different choices, different puzzle solutions, and different endings
- Breathtaking pixel art in twice Primordia’s resolution (640×360—party like it’s 1999!)
- Dozens of rooms to explore, with variant versions as the carnival grows ever more twisted
- An eccentric cast, including a sideshow freak, a telepathic starfish, an animatronic fortune-teller, and a trio of masqueraders
- Full, professional voice over and hours of original music
- A rich, thematic story about identity, loss, self-doubt, and redemption
- Integrated, in-character hint system (optional, of course)
- Hours of developer commentary and an “annotation mode” (providing on-screen explanations for the references woven throughout the game)
At Wormwood Studios, we make games out of love—love for the games we’ve spent our lifetimes playing, love for the games we ourselves create, and love for the players who have made all of those games possible. We know that players invest not just their money and time in the games they play, but also their hope and enthusiasm. And we want to make sure that players receive a rich return on that investment by creating games that provide not only a fun, challenging diversion for a few hours, but also lasting memories to keep for years.
We think the best way to achieve that with Strangeland is to adhere to the genius of the adventure genre: the marriage of challenging puzzles and thrilling exploration, on the one hand, with an engaging narrative, on the other. At the same time, we’ve tried to remove the punitive aspects of adventure games (deaths, dead ends, illogical puzzles, pixel hunting, backtracking, etc.). Within this framework, we add uncanny visuals, memorable characters, and thought-provoking themes. The result for Primordia was a game that has received thousands of positive player reviews, and we have refined our approach further with Strangeland. We hope it will not disappoint the players who have given us such great support and encouragement over the years! And we hope that it will find a place in the hearts of new players as well.
游戏讨论
Steam User 2
可以说是我今年最为喜欢的点击解密类作品之一（我一般以春节为分界线划分一年）。自认为是喜欢荒诞风格的人不得不品的佳作。
尽管核心故事本身十分简单，甚至可以说是有点老套无趣。但本作的美术风格、表现手法以及哲理性十足的交互、对话（包含诸多典故的运用和化用）却很好的弥补了这一点。说实话，我觉得在创作者可能把握不了深刻主题的情况下，单将创作者自身所感受“痛苦与虚无”的情感在作品中极致展现，便已经足够成为佳作了。况且从最后的致谢来看，本作或基于作者自身的经历，那么选择这样的核心故事也更加无可厚非了。
最让我喜欢这部作品的一点是，本作的交互思路和解密思路，均是基于“某一种隐喻”（姑且可以这样笼统概括），没有很多剧情解密游戏中的为了解密而解密，而是将解密与故事表达融为一体。其实单纯只是因为美术想买这部作品，没想到给了我意外之喜。
我本以为故事最后的定调会一头栽进故事本身呈现的荒诞与虚无之中，没想到作者还是给了一个颇为向上的结尾。有点意外和遗憾，感觉有些情感没有表达到极致，又觉得这或许无论对创作者还是游玩者而言，都会多一丝温暖与慰藉。
但无论如何我还是不太喜欢这一转折。最为矛盾的一点在于作品对于主人公做出这一转折的塑造并不充分。那些制作较为潦草的“死亡”结局看上去反而像主人公真正的归宿。
很喜欢作品中对经典的存在、自我与时间的探讨，感觉作者很多观点受到荣格的影响www。总的来说本作还是一部值得推荐的佳作，为了全成就我之后一定会再玩一遍本作的。